Shinjirarenai - An existential (not really) exploration of Tokyo (nightlife)

There are few words in the Japanese language sufficient to explain the culminating event of my past Saturday night/Sunday morning in the lovely and charming village of Tokyo. In fact, there are so few words to describe such a rare event as this, that probably every Japanese person who sees the following blog entry (or hears my story through broken Japanese or in totally normal English) will utter the same word: "Shinjirarenai."

The first time I heard this word was a few weeks ago. It was used repeatedly by a friend of mine, until I finally asked, "What the heck does shinjirarenai mean?" Basically, it means "Unbelieveable." It was explained to me at the time that shinjirarenai is only really used with positive things, as in, "Wow, that octopus sashimi was soooo good, it's amazing. Shinjirarenai!" (I completely made up that example sentence, so I'm not really sure how close it is to actual usage, but I figure there will only be so many chances for my vegetarian self to mention octopus sashimi in this blog, so I went for it.) However, I have since heard the word used on the news by a woman discussing North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens from Japan, people actually abducted right from the street and kidnapped to North Korea by North Korean government agents - not so unbelieveably good as much as unbelieveably bad. So, for the time being, we gaijin/hafu are debating the true meaning of this truly Japanese word. We'll be alerting the Japanese-English Dictionary Writers Association as soon as we've made our determination.

Anyway, when I witnessed this event on the first-ish train home Sunday morning, around 5:30 am (p.s. I did my first all-nighter club-hopping in Shibuya on Saturday - lots of fun, lots of dancing, very tiring), the VERY FIRST WORD that came to mind was: Shinjirarenai!! Big time. Like, maybe one of the best real-life demonstrations of the word's meaning. Seriously.

Are you dying to know what I'm talking about yet?!?!? You wanna know what the event was, right?!?! Okaaaaay...








But first, let me recount my Japanese teacher's reaction when I told her about this event. As chance and technology and Japan and Japanese technology and Japanese technological chance would have it, my cell phone is also equipped with a 3 megapixel digital camera, so I was able to collect evidence - yes, photographic evidence - of this amazing event. Bigfoot hunters should be so lucky. In any case, upon showing my teacher this photo, the first word out of my teacher's mouth was... not shinjirarenai. Rather, it was a more commonly used word: uso! This basically means, "NO WAY!" or "YOU'RE JOKING!" or "YOU LIAR!", depending on the situation. Here, please reference the first meaning.

The second word out of my teacher's mouth was... Shinjirarenai!! No kidding. I'm not uso-ing. How awesome is that?!

Okay, so you wanna know what the event was? It was frickin' amazing. Super funny. Probably (I hope) a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Here it is:




No teasing this time...




Just keep scrolling...




Patience is a virtue...




The suspense of it all!!!





Ta-daaaaa!!!

He's not just asleep - his pants are around his ankles, people!! Look down!! Can you believe it?!?! Shinjirare - frickin' - nai!! (Or as they might say it in Californialand, "Shin - ji - ra - re - nai!" à la Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Oh - my - god, Becky, look at her butt...")

Allow me to elucidate what you are seeing on the screen.

As you can probably imagine, the first-ish trains home on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night out in one of Tokyo's main nightlife areas (Shibuya - click for picture) are basically full of drunk people and the maintenance workers who clean up after them (if you know what I mean). So, the good, the bad, and the tipsy, pile into the trains and, as many Japanese commuters are wont to do even when sober, promptly pass out and sleep soundly until they reach their stations. By the way, I was not one of the bad or the tipsy. 100% sober and, thus, fully able to appreciate the above scene. I've been laughing for the last 36 hours about it. Seriously. People are going to start thinking I'm the crazy one because I keep randomly chuckling to myself as I walk down the street.

In continuation... The man you see here got on the train at the same time as me and rather than taking a seat - there were many available - decided to stand up - at the time, fully clothed. Maybe 10 minutes into the ride, after having shot a picture of some drunk people to my right, I happened to look to my left, when I spotted the above scene. I literally did a double take. At some point in the ride, the guy's pants had completely fallen down. I started to chuckle, thought to myself, "Shinjirarenai," then looked away. I really wanted to take a picture, but I wasn't sure if I should. Was this a common sight on first trains? I didn't know. Should I be laughing so obviously? Was I offending people by laughing? Then I decided to forget all that and take the damn picture. I mean, Hello! How often do you see something like this ANYWHERE in the world, least of all super-clean, super-neat, super-law-abiding Tokyo?!?! So I set my camera on my knee for balance and to frame the shot (I even zoomed in a bit) and got my once-in-a-lifetime picture. Then I heard the click of someone else's phone camera. And more chuckles. By this point, most people around me had noticed the guy and we were all making funny faces at each other, like, "Wow, this is so shinjirarenai!" I guess it's not commonplace on first trains.

After a couple of seconds, though, I started to feel bad for the guy. Poor thing was really out of it and had no idea that people were sitting around laughing at his free show. So, knowing that most likely no one else would be willing to help this guy out, I got up and tried to wake the guy up. I literally had to push his shoulder a couple of times and shout “Sumimasen! Sumimasen!” to get him to open his eyes. When he finally gained some sort of awareness and opened his eyes, I pointed down to his pants. He looked down and went right back to sleep. Well, I'd tried. I sat back down. He woke up again for a second and looked up at me, so I shouted, “Mite! Mite!” ("Look! Look!"), and pointed down. He eventually looked down, realized that his pants were down, pondered what that meant for a couple more seconds, pulled up his pants, and got off the train. Hopefully he was too drunk to remember what was probably the most embarrassing thing to happen to him in his entire life.

At least he was wearing underwear.